posted by Amy Hillier

on January 11, 2007

I made my first trip to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. What a nice place to conduct research. I looked at the annual reports of the College Settlement Association from the mid-18900s and early 1900s. It was the leaders of the Settlement Association who wanted a study of blacks living in the Old Seventh Ward, and Du Bois lived at the Settlement House for the first year he was in Philadelphia.

The Settlement records make a few brief references to Du Bois and his study, but they seem to have given it relatively little attention. Some of the material that I found particularly interesting included:

--A study on the dietary habits of people living in Philadelphia (and one other city). The author, who received a fellowship from the Settlement to conduct the research, complained about people buying inferior food at the nearby stores;

--Report of the kitchen and coffee house, which was a sort of soup kitchen. The Settlement House offered "penny lunches" to neighborhood children. Clearly, the ladies at the Settlement House made connections between nutrition and health and physical and moral well-being.

--Stories about individual children who came to the Settlement House and caused trouble (nothing that a good hug and some discipline couldn't fix, though).

I am hoping to work with HSP to raise money so we can digitize some of these records. The primary sources provide such rich descriptions and photographs of life in the Seventh Ward. I will also be reviewing the scrap books maintained by Susan Wharton that describe a lot of the activity at the Settlment House. Eventually, I hope this research will form the basis of a paper about the intersection of housing, health, and social service/social work, and research activities inthe late 1890s.